I Had a Plan. My Team Had a Problem With It.
When your energy becomes your team's burden
I thought having a plan made me a good manager. I was wrong — and my team felt it before I did.
(I wasn't a natural leader. I just paid close attention to every mistake I made — and started writing them down.)
I had everything mapped out before my first team meeting.
I became a manager and immediately got busy proving I deserved it.
Plans. Priorities. Action items. A full action plan with timelines. I’d spent hours on it. I was proud of it. Everything a leader is supposed to have. I walked in ready to lead.
What I didn’t have — didn’t do and didn’t think to get — not once — was any input from the people I was now responsible for.
That gap cost me more than I expected.
I assumed direction was enough
I thought my job was to come in with answers, not questions. So I presented the plan, explained the vision, and waited for the energy in the room to match mine.
It didn’t.
Polite nods. A few questions. A quiet I told myself was agreement.
So I pushed forward.
More initiatives. More changes. More meetings.
Week after week I kept adding to the plan — convinced that more clarity from me would create more momentum in them.
Instead, I started noticing things.
One of my strongest team members got quieter in meetings. Another started missing small deadlines — nothing dramatic, but enough to feel like a shift. A third stopped offering ideas the way she used to.
The energy I thought I was building was slowly draining out of the room.
I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought I was doing everything right.
Then she told me the truth
One afternoon, almost by accident, I had a real conversation with one of them.
Not a status update. Not a check-in on deliverables. Just a conversation where I stopped talking long enough to actually hear something.
She told me, carefully, that the team felt like they were always catching up. That by the time they understood one change, another was already coming. That they weren’t sure what mattered most — because everything seemed to matter most.
She wasn’t complaining.
She was telling me the truth.
I had been so focused on leading that I forgot to bring anyone with me
The overwhelm wasn’t because my ideas were bad. It was because my team had no ownership of them. I had made every decision alone — then wondered why no one felt invested.
The disengagement I saw wasn’t resistance. It was exhaustion. The quiet kind. The kind that builds when people feel like passengers in their own work.
“The most expensive mistake a new manager makes isn’t a wrong decision. It’s a right decision made without the people who have to carry it.”
That conversation changed how I managed. Not because I stopped having ideas — but because I started treating my team’s thinking as part of the process. Not a box to check after the plan was already written.
Three questions to sit with
Not to answer right now. Just to hold.
When you make decisions about your team — how often are they actually in the room?
Not to approve. Not to be informed. But genuinely involved in shaping what comes next.
What would you learn if you went into your next 1-on-1 with zero agenda and just asked: “What do you need from me right now?”
Most new managers avoid this question because they’re afraid the answer will be something they can’t fix. But the asking itself is the leadership.
(If you want a starting point for those conversations, this piece on how to run a 1-on-1 as a new manager is worth reading. And if the awkwardness of those early meetings is what’s holding you back, this free guide was built for exactly that.)
Is it possible that someone on your team is already feeling what my team felt — and just hasn’t said it yet?
The shift that changed everything
The first 90 days don’t require a perfect plan.
They require genuine curiosity about the people you’re now responsible for.
From having answers to asking better questions. From leading at your team to leading with them.
It’s slower. It’s less impressive at first.
And it’s the only thing that actually works.
(If you want a more structured look at how to navigate those first 90 days, I mapped it out in full right here.)
If this landed for you, forward it to someone in their first manager role. They need to read this before they write their first action plan.
What’s one thing you wish you had asked your team before pushing your first big change? Hit reply — I’d love to hear it.
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— Bastian